Getting internet access, AI policy and AI literacy to 27,000 students in my school district.
Founder of the District Student Web Initiative, then AI Intern in the Superintendent’s Office, 2022 – 2025
Students in my district had Chromebooks but no internet at home. There were low-cost internet programs, both through the school and federally, but almost nobody knew about them, including students and staff.
Through AIME, my district’s internship program, my teacher Mr. Manning helped me put together a team to work on it. We built AUHSD Tech Equity with simple summaries of every program, tech support guides, school tech contacts, and multiple languages since a lot of families in the district don’t speak English at home.
After that, I spent about a year emailing and meeting with the superintendent and CTO to get it rolled out. The site ended up on every district Chromebook, all 27,000 of them.
Later, the district rolled out Skrappy, an AI tutor. It could walk through an algebra problem really well, then confidently make things up when a student asked about their own classes or assignments.
I wanted to understand how something could work that well on one question and then completely make things up on another. Trying to understand how the model actually worked underneath is what got me way more interested in computer science.
As an AI intern in the superintendent’s office, I worked on a district-wide study about how students and staff actually felt about AI, including AI literacy at a Title I school. It got accepted at AERA, the American Educational Research Association.
I also wrote the student AI bylaws our school board adopted, which cover 27,000 students across 21 schools. And I started the AI Ambassador program, where 14 students across 7 high schools run AI literacy workshops.
Outside the district, I taught AI basics to kids ages 6 to 12 through the Telugu Association of Southern California. Most of them were scared of it, thanks to the movies.
We taught image recognition using games like Google Quick Draw and also talked about bias and some of the real problems with AI. By the end, the questions had changed to things like, “How can I build an AI?”
A lot of the time, the resource already existed. The bigger problem was that students either didn’t know about it or didn’t know how to get to it. That’s what I want to keep working on, especially as AI becomes a bigger part of how students learn.
Home